The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News are jointly owned daily newspapers in Philadelphia and the city’s two primary print media outlets.
The two newspapers are owned by H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, who bought the paper in 2014 from Interstate General Media, a holding company owned by a group of local investors of which they had been a part. They share a free website, Philly.com, and also have separate websites launched in 2013, Inquirer.com and PhillyDailyNews.com, which both have hard paywalls.
The Inquirer, a broadsheet, is the larger and older of the two newspapers. It reached national prominence during the 1970s and ’80s under the leadership of Gene Roberts, winning 17 Pulitzer Prizes between 1975 and 1990. The Daily News, a tabloid, was founded in 1925 and became an edition of the Inquirer in 2009.
The two papers were brought under the same ownership in 1957, when the Inquirer’s owner, Moses Annenberg, bought the Daily News. Annenberg sold the papers to the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in 1969. In 2006, when Knight Ridder was bought by the McClatchy Co., the two papers were sold to a group of local investors led by former PR executive Brian Tierney, who became the Inquirer’s publisher later that year.
The papers operated at a profit during Tierney’s tenure, though those calculations didn’t include their debt obligations, which drove Philadelphia Newspapers to file for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In April 2010, the papers were sold to a group of Philadelphia Newspapers’ creditors for $139 million, about a quarter of what Tierney had bought it for four years earlier.